Nightmare Town

  Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.

  “Who’s that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.

  “Landlady.”

  The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You’ll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”

  “My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There’d be just as much sense to it if you’d all jumped out at me and yelled ‘Boo!’ ”

  “This ain’t any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let’s go in where we can talk it over.”

  Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshaling the others into the girl’s rooms.

  “Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I’m easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you’re counting on me talking, too, you’d better smart me up.”

  “Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl’s arm. “I’m at Goodbody’s.”

  “You think I’ve been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That’s what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.

  The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.

  “It’s all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody’s is hanging the rap on me—somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I’ve got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”

  “You’ll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody’s going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”

  “Got anything with a judge’s name on it that says you can?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t get a peep!”

  Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.

  “Who’s this?” he asked the girl.

  “Try and find out!”

  “I am trying,” he lied.

  “You big bum!” said she. “You couldn’t find water in the ocean!”

  Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.

  —

  TWILIGHT WAS around the graystone church when the owner of the deserted coupé returned to it. The chunky girl—Polly Vanness was the name she had given—had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph’s subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.

  Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupé so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curb-side spot within sight of the house.

  The night went along and no one left or entered the Landow house.

  Fingernails clicked on the coupé’s glass door.

  A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective’s notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.

  Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.

  “Got a match?” the man asked.

  The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a box.

  A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheek-bones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.

  But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.

  “I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don’t know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”

  The ex-detective-sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”

  “I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn’t make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupé, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp’s me. I ain’t as well-known as Napoleon, so if you’ve never heard of me there’s no hard feelings.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp’s face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer’ll do for my next question. You’re interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the detective’s voice.

  Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.

  “You ought to want to know what I’m doing hanging around ’em. I ain’t tight. I’ll tell you. I’ve been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl—twice. How do you like that?”

  “I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”

  “Talk? Sure it’s talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so’s it talk when the judge says ‘hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!’ Lots of things are talk, but that don’t always keep ’em from being real.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it’s one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick—a slug through the side of a car—huh?”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” the detective asked. “You want to make it a fancy caper—kill her on her birthday or a legal holiday?”

  Scuttle Zeipp smacked his lips and poked the detective’s chest with a finger in the dark.

  “Not any, brother! I’m thinking way ahead of you! Listen to this: I pocket my two-fifty advance and come up here to give the ground a good casing, not wanting to lam into anything I didn’t know was here. While I’m poking around, I run into another party that’s poking around. This second party gives me a tumble, I talk smart, and bingo! First thing you know she’s propositioning me. What do you guess? She wants to know what I want to bump off a broad! Is it the same one she wants stopped? I hope to tell you it is!

  “It ain’t so silly! I get my hands on another two hundred and fifty berries, with that much more coming when I put over the fast one. Now do you think I’m going to do anything to that Landow baby? You’re dumb if you do. She’s my meal ticket. If she lives till I pop her, she’ll be older than either you or the bay. I’ve got five hundred out of her so far. What’s the matter with sticking around and waiting for more customers that don’t like her? If two of ’em want to buy her out of the world, why not more? The answer is ‘Yeah!’ And on top of that, here you are snooping around her. Now there it is, brother, for you to look at and taste and smell.”

  Silence held for several minutes, in the darkness of the coupé’s interior, and then the detective’s harsh voice put a skeptical question:

  “And who are these certain parties that want her out of the way?”

  “Be yourself!” Scuttle Zeipp admonished him. “I’m laying down on ’em, rig
ht enough, but I ain’t feeding ’em to you.”

  “What are you giving me all this for then?”

  “What for? Because you’re in on the lay somewhere. Crossing each other, neither of us can make a thin dimmer. If we don’t hook up we’ll just ruin the racket for each other. I’ve already made half a grand off this Landow. That’s mine, but there’s more to be picked up by a couple of men that know what they’re doing. All right. I’m offering to throw in with you on a two-way cut of whatever else we can get. But my parties are out! I don’t mind throwing them down, but I ain’t rat enough to put the finger on them for you.”

  Alec Rush grunted and croaked another dubious inquiry.

  “How come you trust me so much, Scuttle?”

  The hired killer laughed knowingly.

  “Why not? You’re a right guy. You can see a profit when it’s showed to you. They didn’t chuck you off the force for forgetting to hang up your stocking. Besides, suppose you want to double-cross me, what can you do? You can’t prove anything. I told you I didn’t mean the woman any harm. I ain’t even packing a gun. But all that’s the bunk. You’re a wise head. You know what’s what. Me and you, Alec, we can get plenty!”

  Silence again, until the detectives spoke slowly, thoughtfully.

  “The first thing would be to get a line on the reasons your parties want the girl put out. Got anything on that?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “Both of ’em women, I take it.”

  Scuttle Zeipp hesitated.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But don’t be asking me anything about ’em. In the first place, I don’t know anything, and in the second, I wouldn’t tip their mitts if I did.”

  “Yeah,” the detective croaked, as if he quite understood his companion’s perverted idea of loyalty. “Now if they’re women, the chances are the racket hangs on a man. What do you think of Landow? He’s a pretty lad.”

  Scuttle Zeipp leaned over to put his finger against the detective’s chest again.

  “You’ve got it, Alec! That could be it, damned if it couldn’t!”

  “Yeah,” Alec Rush agreed, fumbling with the levers of his car. “We’ll get away from here and stay away until I look into him.”

  At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupé.

  “You want to drop out here?” he asked.

  Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man’s ugly face.

  “It’ll do,” the young man said, “but you’re a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It’s a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”

  “I wouldn’t say so.” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good nature. “You’re not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there’s any gravy you’ll get yours, but don’t count on me mobbing up with you.”

  Zeipp’s eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.

  “You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I’ll—” He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn’t make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”

  “Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you’d better drop in to see me to-morrow. The phone book’ll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”

  “So long, Alec.”

  In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.

  The bride’s maiden name thickened the red in the detective’s bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so raspingly that a lawyer’s skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.

  From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride’s name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-month-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.

  Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.

  Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:

  Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well-known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.

  One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o’clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner’s rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight—reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.

  Police investigation established four facts:

  First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o’clock the previous evening.

  Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o’clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car—a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner slightly, and who was connected with the district attorney’s office. Two women, talking on the steps of a house across the street, had also seen Falsoner, and had seen Madeline Boudin and her friends drive away.

  Third, Jerome Falsoner’s heir and only near relative was his niece, Sara Falsoner, who, by some vagary of chance, was marrying Hubert Landow at the very hour that Fanny Kidd was finding her employer’s dead body. Niece and uncle had seldom seen one another. The niece—for police suspicion settled on her for a short space—was definitely proved to have been at home, in her apartment in Carey Street, from six o’clock the evening of the murder until eight-thirty the next morning. Her husband, her fiancé then, had been there with her from six until eleven that evening. Prior to her marriage, the girl had been employed as stenographer by the same trust company that employed Ralph Millar.

  Fourth, Jerome Falsoner, who had not the most even of dispositions, had quarreled with an Icelander named Einar Jokumsson in a gambling-house two days before he was murdered. Jokumsson had threatened him. Jokumsson—a short, heavily built man, dark-haired, dark-eyed—had vanished from his hotel, leaving his bags there, the day the body was found, and had not been seen since.

  The last of these clippings carefully read, Alec Rush rocked back in his chair and made a thoughtful monster’s face at the ceiling. Presently he leaned forward again to look into the telephone directory, and to call the number of Ralph Millar’s trust company. But when he got his number he changed his mind.

  “Never mind,” he said into the instrument, and called a number that was Goodbody’s. Minnie, when she came to the telephone, told him that Polly Vann
ess had been identified as one Polly Bangs, arrested in Milwaukee two years ago for shoplifting, and given a two-year sentence. Minnie also said that Polly Bangs had been released on bail early that morning.

  Alec Rush pushed back the telephone and looked through his clippings again until he found the address of Madeline Boudin, the woman who had visited Falsoner so soon before his death. It was a Madison Avenue number. Thither his coupé carried the detective.

  No, Miss Boudin did not live there. Yes, she had lived there, but had moved four months ago. Perhaps Mrs. Blender, on the third floor, would know where she lived now. Mrs. Blender did not know. She knew Miss Boudin had moved to an apartment house in Garrison Avenue, but did not think she was living there now. At the Garrison Avenue house: Miss Boudin had moved away a month and a half ago—somewhere in Mount Royal Avenue, perhaps. The number was not known.

  The coupé carried its ugly owner to Mount Royal Avenue, to the apartment building he had seen first Hubert Landow and then Scuttle Zeipp visit the previous day. At the manager’s office he made inquiries about a Walter Boyden, who was thought to live there. Walter Boyden was not known to the manager. There was a Miss Boudin in 604, but her name was B-o-u-d-i-n, and she lived alone.

  Alec Rush left the building and got in his car again. He screwed up his savage red eyes, nodded his head in a satisfied way, and with one finger described a small circle in the air. Then he returned to his office.

  Calling the trust company’s number again, he gave Ralph Millar’s name, and presently was speaking to the assistant cashier.

  “This is Rush. Can you come up to the office right away?”

  “What’s that? Certainly. But how—how—? Yes, I’ll be up in a minute.”

  None of the surprise that had been in Millar’s telephone voice was apparent when he reached the detective’s office. He asked no questions concerning the detective’s knowledge of his identity. In brown to-day, he was as neatly inconspicuous as he had been yesterday in gray.

  “Come in,” the ugly man welcomed him. “Sit down. I’ve got to have some more facts, Mr. Millar.”